Impact of Students Internship Experience on their Perception of Journalism Ethics

How journalists keep the ethics of their profession has always been a subject of interest to scholars. This is because journalism, as a profession, has much impact on the development of society and when its ethical codes are violated; a great deal of damage could be done. However, most studies on the issue of keeping ethics by journalists focused on practising journalists and not much on trainee-journalists. This is where the present study is significant in the sense that it has contributed to the growing knowledge on student-journalist’s perception of ethics. The study seeks to ascertain the extent internship experience makes journalism ethics credible to the student-journalist. Questionnaire copies were administered on two sets of graduating students of the Department of Mass Communication, Taraba State, University, Jalingo, Nigeria at different times. The result shows that the students were knowledgeable about journalism ethics through classroom teaching before embarking on internship. Although trainee-journalists in this study observed some unethical conduct among older journalists they worked with, that did not dampen the belief of such students in the importance of ethics to journalism practice. The study recommends that practising journalists should recognize that they are role models to the younger generation in terms of exemplary professional conduct.